Friday Reading S03E01

My weekly round-up of interesting things I found on the web about media, tech and politics, which I thought you might find interesting too…

There has been a lot of comment in the media about an attempt to exclude journalists from a self-declared “safe space” on a University campus, which has prompted much hand-wringing. It is maybe useful to remind ourselves of the context in which the student protests have been carried out:

“Mizzou is where I met my closest friends and fell in love with journalism, but it is also where I was called a n*gger for the first time that I can remember.”

“Christakis’ email was surely not sent from a place of malice; but any real attempt to understand and appreciate the concerns of those who disagreed with her was similarly missing. And in the specific context of ICA’s missive, her implicit defense of some costumes as ‘subversive’ — rather than, y’know, bigoted — is concerning.”

“People were frustrated that they couldn’t find a game because the servers couldn’t handle the traffic, naturally. But it was a good-natured frustration. Then the GIFs started rolling in, dangling the possibilities of the game before us. Rather than anyone constructing effigies of Psyonix with caps lock and vitriol, the mood was more like: wow, I can’t wait until this game works.”

“‘When the first time machine is turned on it will be possible for our descendants to contact us but we will not be able to contact our ancestors,’ he says. Theoretically, this would explain why we haven’t experienced time travel (or its effects) yet, because the first human scale time machine hasn’t been created.”

My 6 year old daughter has been using the Star Wars-themed “Hour of Code” to learn JavaScript this week. I was particularly impressed that it seems like all they way through they have used women coders who worked on Star Wars to present the tutorial videos.

“We now have an annual festival of contrived outrage where it seems that there are those for whom scanning the airwaves and the television screen for signs of refusal to participate or, indeed, active dissent is more important than paying respect to the memory of those whom they claim to honour.”